Earlier this year, playwright Deborah Margolin sent Elie Wiesel the original version of a script fictionalizing Wiesel’s real-life betrayal by Bernie Madoff; the renowned author wrote back threatening to take legal action against its production. The play, he wrote, was “defamatory” and “obscene.” Margolin’s revised version of Imagining Madoff, which opened last week in upstate New York, is now difficult to construe as defamatory: Wiesel is gone, replaced by a character who shares some of his defining traits but not his name. But if we take “obscene” to mean that which lies outside the moral boundaries Wiesel has spent his career policing, the play is still that—which is what makes it a great work of theater.

The main action of Imagining Madoff—playing at Stageworks Hudson in Hudson, New York—takes place during a long, scotch-soaked, pre-recession evening in the study of Solomon Galkin, a Holocaust survivor, poet, and Jewish community leader who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to a certain Nobel laureate. Madoff, as imagined by Margolin, manages the funds of the Manhattan synagogue where Galkin (Howard Green) is treasurer; now Galkin, dazzled with the results, has summoned the magician to his home, hoping Madoff will take on his personal investments as well. The men banter easily, and their business meeting becomes a rambling debate over money, morality, Judaism, the Holocaust, and sex, with Madoff playing the whip-smart cynic to Galkin’s erudite moralist. What Galkin doesn’t know is that, like the hapless mortals of religious allegory who try to out-reason the Devil (as in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) or Death (as in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), his interlocutor holds a stacked deck—and Galkin’s fate—in his hands.

In Margolin’s telling, Madoff (played wonderfully by Mark Margolis) may not literally be Satan, but like the devils of literature, he can be charming, sadistic, and profound at the same time. Sitting in his prison cell, telling his story to a biographer (the scene in Galkin’s study is actually an extended flashback), he makes what may sound like a laughably outrageous claim: “I didn’t really care that much about the money.” But perhaps it’s not so outrageous. Serial killers, we know from the movies, are motivated less by practicality than by perversity—even, like Hannibal Lecter, by refined aesthetics—so, why can’t the same be true of serial extortionists? “There was the music of it,” Madoff says wistfully. The dollars don’t just flash before his eyes; he waltzes with them. Later, he remembers a dream in which his penis is a vagina and his vagina is a wallet. The play’s third character, a former Madoff secretary whom we periodically see testifying before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, offers the deliciously creepy fact that in 10 years, she never saw her former boss get up to go to the bathroom.

Most devilishly of all, Madoff as portrayed by Margolin is a kind of unconscientious objector to the moral universe presided over by the god of Abraham, where piety and obedience are rewarded and hubris is shunned. Galkin, then, is his natural enemy: a man who has seen hell and, instead of capitulating to its amoral code, has embraced Torah, ethics, and the Jewish people. He also happens to be a bit of a sap. Prattling about God and Sandy Koufax in his plush study, he comes across as self-satisfied and somewhat soft in the head. Madoff repeatedly attempts to convince Galkin that the latter’s beloved Talmudic riddles are not paths to higher wisdom but to complacency. Galkin will have none of it: For him, the very fact that a financial sorcerer is managing his synagogue’s funds is evidence of divine favor. “A lot of people ask me: Who is this Madoff? How does he make these miracles with money?” he says. “And I tell them: No one knows! That’s what makes it a miracle!”

Galkin, in short, is Madoff’s perfect mark: His belief in providence and in the goodness of fellow Jews makes him easy to exploit, and that, in turn, means Madoff wins their philosophical debate. His ability to betray his own people reveals the limits of Galkin’s moral imagination. “I wanted to rip up the picture he had of the world,” Madoff tells us. “His picture of the world as a place where some men are purely moral. I wanted to say, ‘Wake up, asshole! Wake up!’ It’s a danger to the world, that picture, that idea of moral men. With that picture in your mind you’ll be murdered in your sleep.”

Margolin’s most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin’s credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe. “Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t any man, still follow the leader blindly without knowing where he was going?” Madoff demands. Galkin will not entertain the possibility that despite his hard-won moral insights, he too is capable of “just following orders”; Madoff, meanwhile, never seems to consider that such a consummately human failing deserves sympathy rather than contempt.

In the end, the only character willing to consider the possibility that she has erred is the one without a bone to pick about the essential moral character of the world. “I never asked many questions,” Madoff’s secretary tells the SEC guiltily at the beginning of the play. By its end, she has charged herself more harshly than a judge, earthly or celestial, ever would. “I committed a crime,” she says, “and I didn’t even know it.”

Marissa Brostoff, a doctoral student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, is a former staff writer at Tablet and the Forward.

WAIT, WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY TO COMMENT?
Tablet is committed to bringing you the best, smartest, most enlightening and entertaining reporting and writing on Jewish life, all free of charge. We take pride in our community of readers, and are thrilled that you choose to engage with us in a way that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, allowing vocal—and, often, anonymous—minorities to drag it down with invective (and worse). Starting today, then, we are asking people who'd like to post comments on the site to pay a nominal fee—less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place.

I NEED TO BE HEARD! BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY.
Readers can still interact with us free of charge via Facebook, Twitter, and our other social media channels, or write to us at letters@tabletmag.com. Each week, we’ll select the best letters and publish them in a new letters to the editor feature on the Scroll.

We hope this new largely symbolic measure will help us create a more pleasant and cultivated environment for all of our readers, and, as always, we thank you deeply for your support.

Your fine review manages to do something few news stories on the subject have: make sense of the Madoff scandal.

Jacobsays:

July 28, 2010 - 11:13 am

Obscenity may be legal under the first amendment but its use has never made anyone great or even mediocre.

Arnonsays:

July 28, 2010 - 11:21 am

“Margolin’s most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin’s credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe.”

This is a ridiculous and hysterical comparison.

A better comparison would be to those gullible pro leftist Russian bourgeois who gave their wealth to Lenin in order to be spared by his murderous henchmen who proceeded to murder them and rape their wives and daughters.

How do you like dem apples, Marrisa. Once you begin with specious comparisons there is no end to the possible atrocities you can compare the unimaginative swindler Madoff.

Investigators are now saying that he didn’t take in as much money as they thought. Rather than the supposed sixty billion he only took in around twenty billion. It sounds like a lot but for a financial firm this is peanuts.

Not Hitler or Lenin should he be compared to, but to some third rate third world dictator like Noriega who also got caught.

Steven Ekstractsays:

July 28, 2010 - 12:23 pm

Never mind the naysayers- your review is spot on.

Daniel Kleinsays:

July 28, 2010 - 12:26 pm

Jacob, what about Joyce, bukowski, ginsberg and Burroughs?–to name just a few.

Earl Ganzsays:

July 28, 2010 - 2:18 pm

Marissa,

Good review. It makes me want to see the play which is what a good review is
supposed to do

Daniel Klein says:
“Jacob, what about Joyce, bukowski, ginsberg and Burroughs?–to name just a few.”

So, you think that obscenity made Joyce a great writer?

Gee, and I thought it was his sublime use of language in all its registers.

As for the other name on your list, ( I can’t say anything abut the etceteras) with the exception of Ginsberg, who does have some first rate poems which are not due, btw, to his use of obscenity, the other writers are not great and buskowski is a mediocrity.

Mark margolissays:

July 28, 2010 - 6:25 pm

Dear Marissa: thank you. Lord, but u have a double first class
mind & a clear sober brilliance in your thoughts, your way of writing.
mm

Tobysays:

July 28, 2010 - 10:37 pm

Looks like Deborah Margolin’s friends have been posting their support here.

Margolin’s equation of Madoff to a Nazi leader is both obscene and libelous.

People who approve of this view have lost all sense of decency and need a swift kick in the pants.

Tobysays:

July 28, 2010 - 10:38 pm

I meant you, mark Margolis. Shame on you.

Mark margolissays:

July 29, 2010 - 12:26 am

Dear Toby I am in the play & u do not know what the
he’ll you are talking about. There is not an iota of equating
madoff to any Nazi or Nazis or whatever is in your
imaginiation. I do not know what u saw or read but u are
very dangerously confused. But please do continue running
with that imagined ball that u have in mind. The tea party needs u.
They dine on imagined demons

Tobysays:

July 29, 2010 - 1:26 am

Mark margolis says: “Dear Toby I am in the play & u do not know what the
he’ll you are talking about.”

Save your hypocritical “dears,” Margolis.

You just another dummy ventriloquist, that’s what actors are. You mouth the words that others wrote and think you know what they mean.

This is what the play is about:

““Margolin’s most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin’s credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe.”

And you don’t think there are reference to Nazis in the play.

Josephsays:

July 29, 2010 - 12:38 pm

Toby says: “Margolin’s equation of Madoff to a Nazi leader is both obscene and libelous.”

Veyizmir. The play sounds really intriguing and thought-provoking. Art gets to ask questions. It’s allusive. No one is saying OOH OOH ELIE WIESEL IS A NAZI. I prefer not to praise or flame a work I haven’t seen, but it seems clear that the questions “What motivated Madoff?” and “How were people suckered by his impossible, contrary-to-all-reason returns?” are fit subjects for theater and musing in general.

Arnonsays:

July 29, 2010 - 3:42 pm

marjorie says: ““What motivated Madoff?” and “How were people suckered by his impossible.”

Don’t be myopic marjorie, or is it ignorance. People, well to do, and very intelligent people, have been suckered in many ways for centuries.

What is different here is the scale, but even here it’s not as large as at first thought, then there is the fact that the principles and victims are Jews and some Jews think they are exempt from the laws of human nature.

It’s absurd.

Madoff is a crook who belongs in jail and the rest have learned a valuable lesson. To introduce phrases like “good Germans” etc. is absurd.

Tobysays:

July 29, 2010 - 3:43 pm

Joseph says:

“Now there’s a libel suit I’d love to see!”

Joseph just because one can’t sue doesn’t mean that they are morally correct.

TheDevilCanDancesays:

August 3, 2010 - 6:34 am

Elie Wiesel & Madoff, the crook & the crook…..A can of worms cannot get better.

Beverlyaadsays:

August 12, 2010 - 7:55 pm

There has never been and please god there should never be anything that should compare to the holocaust or any reference to good Germans. Madoff is a crook and a despicable human being may he spend his life in jail

I’m very glad I found your blog on stumbleupon. Thanks for the sensible critique. Me and my girlfriend were just making ready to perform a little research about this. I am very glad to see such good info being shared freely out there.

Name (required)Email (required, will not be published)Website (optional)

Message

2000

Your comment may be no longer than 2,000 characters, approximately 400 words. HTML tags are not permitted, nor are more than two URLs per comment. We reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.